An Informative Introduction to the Issue and Opposing Positions: Providing Background Information

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 Analyze 
Use the basic features.

Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal article, with its challenging title and tone, helped popularize her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It fueled controversy, generating many reviews and opinion pieces—including Rosin’s “Mother Inferior?”—in newspapers, on blogs, and on talk shows. Writing only a short time after Chua’s article was published, Samson could assume that many of her readers would be likely to know about the controversy. Nevertheless, she begins by providing some background information to help readers think about the issue.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a few paragraphs analyzing and evaluating how Samson introduces the issue in her essay “Does Mother Know Best?“:

  1. How does discussing what she calls the child’s “process of seeking autonomy” (par. 1) help Samson engage readers’ interest in parenting styles? (You may assume that her audience includes both her instructor and other first-year writing students.)
  2. Notice that in paragraph 2 Samson provides information about helicopter parenting from two different sources, Cline and Fay, and Whitehead (quoted in Aucoin's “For Some, Helicopter Parenting Delivers Benefits”). How effectively does this information contextualize the debate between Chua and Rosin?

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